On June 21st I had the pleasure to be ‘in conversation’ with Iranian journalist Shokoofeh Azar at the Geelong Regional library.
Forced to leave Iran in 2010, she was accepted as a political refugee by Australia; Shokoofeh has made her home in Geelong. Her extraordinarily powerful novel was short-listed for the 2018 Stella Prize and is set in Iran as a reimagining of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and written in the lyrical magical realism style of classical Persian storytelling.
I described her novel as a ‘gift to Australian literary life.’
